of tl population who wait for years to pick up on a new gadget. Why bother with them? They’re going to sit on their hands, unrecognized text ing at the new and refusing to buy. Marketers generally ignore them, assuming laggards are irrelevant to the early success of a high tech invention. But this view might be pre-
cisely wrong. If you believe recent work by Jacob Goldenberg, an Israeli marketing academic, lag-
garcls might be a crucial high tech demographic. How could this be? Golden-
berg offers the following thought experiment. Imagine that John is a laggard who buys a Walk-
man and listens to it while he jogs every day. Eventually, the Discman comes along, but John d0esn’t upgrade because he doesn’t see anything wrong with his Walkman and d0esn’t want to rebuy his unrecognized text on CD. Then MiniDisc players come along, but John still holds on to his Walk-
man. Then, 16 years after he bought his por-
table tape deck, MP3 players become the hot uw thing. By now, though, .John is finally starting to feel unrecognized text about his huge. bulky Walkman, and maybe unrecognized text starting to break clown. He’s finally ready to buy a new music player, so he becomes-ironically-one of the unrecognized text people to get an iPod. This, as Goldnberg and his colleague Shaul Oreg put it, is the “leapfrog effect.” A laggard, merely by behaving like a laggard, can wind up becoming one of the most avant­garde of early adopters. 
“We realized that the definition oflaggard is wrong,” Goldenberg says. “ln the case of mul-
unrecognized text generations of products, they can just skip generations. So they can also be first.” Nice theory, but is it true? To test it, Gold-
enberg surveyed 105 people in 2003 to unrecognized text 
out what sort of portable audio players they owned. Bingo: Fully 10 percent had done exactly what Goldenberg predicted-they’d jumped from a cassette player straight to an MP3 player. Another 23 percent hadn’t bought anything yet to replace their cas-
sette player, so presumably they, too, unrecognized text possibly even becoming the folks who buy the next new new thing. Golclenberg argues that the economic impact of leapfroggìng laggards is huge. By his calculations, if only 10 percent of lag-
gards leapfrog, their purchases can drive profits from a new gadget 89 percent higher than they would be without leapfrogging. “And that can be the difference between succeeding and not succeeding,” he says.